As Far as You Can Go
Read As Far as You Can Go Online
Authors: Lesley Glaister
| As Far as You Can Go |
| Lesley Glaister |
| Bloomsbury Publishing (2004) |
Opportunity for the Right Applicants. Housekeeper/companions required. Would suit young couple. Remote, rural location. Cooking, cleaning, gardening and caring duties. Applicants must be self-sufficient and resourceful.
It seems like the perfect job for Cassie and Graham. She wants an adventure before she has a child. A year away might convince Graham to settle down, curb his roving eye. Graham seeks inspiration for his painting. He wants Cassie but he wants freedom too - a balancing act as difficult as the ladder trick he tries to perfect. This could be the answer. But Woolagong Station, at the edge of the desert, is eeriely further away from civilisation than they expected.
Larry, their smooth, enigmatic employer, runs his house in a discomfiting fashion. Why is there no radio? Why is there no post from home? Why does Mara, his wife, live sedated in a shed? And how does Larry intuit things he could not possibly know? Everything warps under the blazing Australian sun - their sense of direction, their sex drives, even their sense of right and wrong. And the freedom to roam soon begins to feel like a dangerous prison.
Brilliantly evoking the paranoia and menace lurking behind the most innocent seeming landscape, Lesley Glaister writes of human behaviour at its most edgy and unnerving. As Far As You Can Go sees her at the top of her form - darkly erotic and utterly riveting.
Lesley Glaister teaches a Master's degree in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of eight novels which include Honour Thy Father, winner of the Somerset Maugham and a Betty Trask award, Easy Peasy, Sheer Blue Bliss and most recently Now You See Me.
For
Hilary Mantel
GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR THE RIGHT APPLICANTS
Western Australia. Housekeeper/companions required. Would suit young couple. Remote, rural location. Cooking, cleaning, gardening and caring duties. Applicants must be self-sufficient and resourceful. Applications by 3rd August to Mr L. DRAKE c/o Cavendish Hotel, Kensington Rise, LONDON W11 7AX.
The lift is lined with mirrors, with many Cassies. She can see a back view of herself, a queue of back views receding deep into the bleary yellow-tinged glass, each one with the same amateurish French pleat. She licks her fingers and tries to smooth the wisps back. She pulls out a lipstick and does her lips. She does want to be
plausible
.
Room 302 is round the corner from the lift. A cart full of folded sheets and towels, sachets of coffee and shampoo waits in the corridor and from the open door of the room next door comes the dreary whine of a vacuum cleaner banging against skirting boards. She knocks on the door, the weak sound of her knuckles disappearing into dark wood. Whoever was vacuuming bursts into ‘I Will Survive’, triumphantly out of tune.
She waits and knocks again, harder. The numbers 302 are made of some metal, maybe brass, the 2 skew-whiff. The door opens. The man is small with a grey, pointy beard. His wiry eyebrows are winged upwards, maybe that’s what makes him seem surprised. He’s wearing a black polo-necked sweater and his hair is a luxuriant, not far off bouffant, silver.
‘Cassandra? Larry Drake. Delighted to meet you.’ His hand as it takes hers is small and soft. He looks behind her.
‘Graham wasn’t well enough to travel, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Flu. He’s really sorry.’
He pauses. ‘A shame. No matter. Hold on.’ He leans past her to hook a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the door-handle. ‘Come in, shall I order coffee?’
‘No, but thanks.’
He gestures her into the room, a room dominated by a huge bed. Wouldn’t the lobby have been better? she thinks. Seems very odd to be squeezing round a bed with a complete stranger.
‘Please, do sit down.’
Two chairs have been arranged beside the window where the sunlight struggles in through a swathe of net. On the bed, amongst a scatter of papers, she can see her letter of application, written one morning when Graham was still asleep. She’d gone out, got the paper, read it, seen the ad, written the letter, gone out again and posted it. And all before he’d even opened his eyes.
‘Can I offer you a drink?’ Larry says.
‘No thanks.’ Or is it rude to refuse? ‘Maybe some water,’ she says,
‘please.’
He takes a Perrier from the mini-bar and hands it to her with a glass.
‘Do you not drink alcohol?’
‘Not at eleven in the morning!’
He regards her for a moment. ‘Mind if I do?’
She blushes. ‘Course not!’
He tips a miniature Scotch into a glass and sits down. They are close, knees only inches apart. There should be a desk or something between them. She feels exposed. Her knees vulnerable in the sheer biscuit-coloured tights. Should have worn trousers. Should have been
herself
.
His nails are sharp and pearly and chink against his glass. He gazes at her for a moment, saying nothing. Cassie makes herself gaze back. His face is carefully shaved, a thin moustache like a strip of pipe cleaner, a little stripe of beard between his lower lip and the grey point on his chin. It must be more trouble than ordinary shaving. Almost like topiary. His eyebrows make him
look devilish with the wiry licks at the ends. The skin beside the grey whiskers is tanned like fine leather, lightly creased.
‘Well then,’ he says at last, ‘tell me why you’d like the job. You and Graham.’
Cassie clears her throat. ‘Well, we feel – Graham and I – we both feel like we want to do something else.’
He leans back in his chair and crosses his ankles. ‘Ah, I see. An adventure?’
‘Yes. Sort of. Exactly.’
‘Life a bit dull, eh?’
‘No, no, we just thought we’d like a change. Patsy, my twin sister, she’s had a baby and I want to do something. Before I do. Have a baby, I mean.’
Larry nods. ‘Well then, tell me about yourself.’
Cassie takes a breath and goes though the list: school, degree, jobs. He listens politely. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Now tell me about
you.’
‘Me?’
‘The
relevant
you.’
‘Relevant!’ Cassie tries to think of something witty, can’t, the wait goes on too long. She blushes again, tries to laugh. ‘Not much to say.’ So
lame
. The right applicant will not be
lame
. She remembers her water and takes a prickly sip.
He makes a small impatient sound, looks at his watch. That’s that then, she thinks.
‘For example,’ he says, ‘what do you like to do?’
‘Well, I love gardening. That’s actually what caught my eye in your advert. I teach it.’
‘Yes?’
‘Organic gardening – adult education.’
‘Ah.’
‘And I thought it might make an interesting module – you know gardening in another climate. What’s the climate like in Western Australia?’
‘Hot. We’re right on the tropic of Capricorn, fringes of the desert.’
‘Desert,’ she repeats with relish. ‘I was reading something about that, about desert reclamation, the use of mulches –’
He laughs. ‘Well you’d be very welcome to experiment. I’m sure the garden would flourish.’
‘What do you grow?’
‘Oh,’ he waves his hand, ‘tomatoes and so on. Now, what else do you have to recommend you?’
‘Just the usual things,’ she says, ‘cooking I enjoy. Dressmaking and mending things. I really enjoy
decorating
, strange as that may seem.’ She pauses, notices a pink smudge of lipstick on the rim of her glass. ‘But gardening and cooking are what I like best. Ideally combining the two, growing things and then cooking them –’
‘A useful person
indeed,’
he says. ‘Now, tell me about Graham.’
She looks down at the bubbles streaming to the surface of her water. ‘As I said in my letter, he’s a painter.’ He waits for more but her mind goes blank. ‘He plays the harmonica a bit sometimes, but not in public,’ she says.
‘You probably have questions,’ Larry says, withdrawing himself a little, taking another sip of Scotch. ‘The advertisement was anything but explicit. Deliberately so, in order not to – cut off avenues prematurely. You see?’
She wonders how old he is. The white hair made him seem quite old at first but the way he moves is young – the way he speaks – you can’t tell. There’s something pleasantly reptilian about him, a grain of gold in his skin. If he took off his shirt you wouldn’t be surprised to find a pattern there, like lizard skin. She blinks, startled by the thought.
‘Well –?’
‘What would we actually do?’ she says. ‘On a daily basis, I mean.’
‘What would you expect to do?’
‘I’m not sure – housekeeping and so on?’
‘Yes. Certainly that. Mara, my wife, she is not – let us say not entirely “well”. She needs help with –’ the corner of his lip twitches, ‘housekeeping, yes, but she also needs companionship. I’m away sometimes, and,’ he stretches out his arms, ‘as you see, the place we live – Woolagong Station – it’s somewhat … remote.’
‘Station?’
‘Was a sheep station, half a million acres, but it’s no longer worked.’
‘Half a
million
acres?’
‘Farms – what you would call farms – are much bigger there. A different scale entirely.’
‘How far is Woolagong from – say, Perth?’ she asks.
‘A long way. What drew me to your application, Cassandra –’
‘Most people call me Cassie.’
‘Cassie. Charming. Well, do call me Larry. What interested me – us – was that Graham paints. You see Mara – well, she has painted in the past, she was good. I think it would benefit her to have the company of another painter. Would Graham be prepared to encourage her, do you think?’
‘Definitely.’
‘And is he handy too? There might be some maintenance work involved.’
‘Well, I’m “handier” than him actually. He’s more the, you know, “artist”.’
He raises his flying eyebrows. ‘Do you happen to have a photograph of him?’
Cassie takes her purse out of her bag and hands him a photo. Graham on the beach, bare tanned torso, his long black hair tied back from his face, so that it
could
look short. It gives her a pang to see it, him suddenly there in the room, as she lines up her ultimatum. It might be the end of them. She swallows.
Larry glances at the photo, nods and hands it back without comment. ‘Are there any medical conditions I should know about? Either of you on any prescription drugs?’
‘No.’
‘Any psychological problems?’
She frowns.
‘You see, Woolagong is quite remote. The couple I appoint, they must be – how shall I say? Quite stable and robust.’ Larry laces his fingers together, bends them back till the knuckles click. ‘I’d be taking a risk, without meeting Graham. How would you describe him?’
She looks down at the photo. ‘He’s – it’s difficult to describe someone, isn’t it? He’s artistic, he’s not
that
domestic to be honest. He’s good company, very you know,
popular.’
She presses her lips together, wondering what sort of popular he’s being at this very moment. ‘He’s robust and –’ she crosses her fingers in her lap, ‘stable. We both are.’